Music appreciation/enjoyment and technical knowledge

[teamsaint]

A great thread by the OP.

I've played guitar for fifteen years but with more a practical knowledge of chords and scales. Since almost all my listening is classical these days, and I've begun to read around the subject (Wolff's imperious biography of Bach, etc.), I've decided to gen up on music knowledge to try and get more out of these books and some of the more musicological discussions on here.

The book I plumped for is this. Tax-dodgers link here.



It's pretty technical, as it's written by a science writer, and so goes into details about the physics as well as theory, but that's something I wanted to know about, too, and I've been able to keep up thus far (50 pages in!)

Another thing I've begun to do is follow scores with music. I started with Bach's cello suites, though this was not as easy as I'd imagined it to be! My advice: pick the slowest sarabande and the slowest interpretation of that sarabande you can find. Suite scores available to peruse as PDFs for nowt here.

lots of stuff like this on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZJIybCUjYM

I enjoy following stuff this way, from time to time. I find it aids concentration too.

[LeMartinPecheur]

I have very little musical training, play no instrument, am at best a half-useful choral bass. Am definitely in the camp who want to know what's going on in a piece of music, how it works, why it works. Have learnt a lot from Hans Keller, Anthony Hopkins, BaL, what I can understand of Schenkerian analysis, perusal of many books on composers and their music.

I have often gained a way into a difficult work through listening to such R3 programmes. Sometimes it's been very helpful to learn that I am on the right track in the way I'm listening to a work(*), and in the connections that my brain is making in seeking to grasp why the work makes a musical unity. That I think is one of the big attractions of 'classical music': it's a kind of musical kaleidoscope in which our brains attempt to connect up all the bits, whether or not we have any paper musical qualifications. I think this may be why children in the womb seem to like quite complicated music: it's a sort of free adventure playgound for brains still without powers of analysis (verbal, mathematical or symbolic-logical!). "Only connect" to coin a phrase!

(*) To attempt to explain what I mean by how you listen, I think of my father. He liked Mahler's 1st but absolutely hated his 9th. I think this may have been because he could only hear the latter as a melody-line with pretty dissonant harmony, rather than spotting the counterpoint that often generates (requires?) the harmony.

Sometimes a spoken analysis will enable a recalibration of the lugholes that suddenly makes sense of the work. I recall particularly a 70s programme (Hopkins?) on Webern's Symphony Op21 - the scales suddenly fell from my ears